Sunday, January 15, 2017

Daniel Lazare -- The Scheme to Take Down Trump

Exclusive: The U.S. intelligence community’s unprecedented
assault on an incoming U.S. president – now including spreading salacious
rumors – raises questions about how long Donald Trump can hold the White House,
says Daniel Lazare.

By Daniel Lazare

Is a military coup in the works? Or are U.S.
intelligence agencies laying the political groundwork for forcing Donald Trump
from the presidency because they can’t abide his rejection of a new cold war
with Russia? Not long ago, even asking such questions would have marked one as
the sort of paranoid nut who believes that lizard people run the government. But no
longer.

Thanks to the now-notorious 35-page dossier concerning
Donald Trump’s alleged sexual improprieties in a Moscow luxury hotel, it’s
clear that strange maneuverings are underway in Washington and that no one is
quite sure how they will end.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper added
to the mystery Wednesday evening by releasing a 200-word statement to the effect that he was shocked, shocked, that
the dossier had found its way into the press. Such leaks, the statement
said, “are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.”

Clapper added: “that this document is nota
US Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from
within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this
document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our
conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are
provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect
national security.”

Rather than vouching for the dossier’s contents, in
other words, all Clapper says he did was inform Trump that it was making the
rounds in Washington and that he should know what it said – and that he thus
couldn’t have been more horrified than when Buzzfeed posted
all 35 pages on its website.

But it doesn’t make sense. As The New
York Timesnoted, “putting the summary in a report that went to
multiple people in Congress and the executive branch made it very
likely that it would be leaked” (emphasis in the original). So
even if the “intelligence community” didn’t leak the dossier itself, it
distributed it knowing that someone else would.

Then there is the Guardian, second to
none in its loathing for Trump and Vladimir Putin and hence intent on giving
the dossier the best possible spin. It printed a quasi-defense not of the
memo itself but of the man who wrote it: Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 officer
who now heads his own private intelligence firm. “A sober, cautious and
meticulous professional with a formidable record” is how the Guardiandescribed him. Then it quoted an unnamed ex-Foreign
Office official on the subject of Steele’s credibility:

“The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is
false, completely untrue. Chris is an experienced and highly regarded
professional. He’s not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip.
… If he puts something in a report, he believes there’s sufficient
credibility in it for it to be worth considering. Chris is a very straight guy.
He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights
of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way.”

In other words, Steele is a straight-shooter, so it’s
worth paying attention to what he has to say. Or so the Guardian assures
us. “That is the way the CIA and the FBI, not to mention the British
government, regarded him, too,” it adds, so presumably Clapper felt the same
way.

What is Afoot?

So what does it all mean? Simply that U.S.
intelligence agencies believed that the dossier came from a reliable source and
that, as a consequence, there was a significant possibility that Trump was a
“Siberian candidate,” as Times columnist Paul Krugman once described him. They therefore sent out multiple copies of a
two-page summary on the assumption that at least one would find its way to the
press.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
(right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan
and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of
National Intelligence)

Even if Clapper & Co. took no position concerning
the dossier’s contents, they knew that preparing and distributing such a
summary amounted to a tacit endorsement. They also knew, presumably, that
it would provide editors with an excuse to go public. If the CIA, FBI, and
National Security Agency feel that Steele’s findings are worthy of attention,
then why shouldn’t the average reader have an opportunity to examine them as
well?

How did Clapper expect Trump to respond when presented
with allegations that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail and potentially
under the Kremlin’s thumb? Did he expect him to hang his head in shame,
break into great racking sobs, and admit that it was all true? If so, did
Clapper \then plan to place a comforting hand on Trump’s shoulder and suggest,
gently but firmly, that it was time to step aside and allow a trusted insider
like Mike Pence to take the reins?

Based on the sturm und drang of the
last few days, the answer is very possibly yes. If so, the gambit failed
when Trump, in his usual high-voltage manner, denounced the dossier as “fake news” and sailed into the
intelligence agencies for behaving like something out of “Nazi
Germany.” The intelligence community’s hopes, if that’s what they were,
were dashed.

All of which is thoroughly unprecedented by American
political standards. After all, this is a country that takes endless pride
in the peaceful transfer of power every four years or so. Yet here was the
intelligence community attempting to short-circuit the process by engineering
Trump’s removal before he even took office.

But the Guardian then upped the ante
even more by suggesting that the CIA continue with the struggle. Plainly,
the Republican congressional leadership has “no appetite” for an inquiry into
Steele’s findings, the paper’s New York correspondent, Ed Pilkington, wrote, adding:

“That leaves the intelligence agencies. The danger for
Trump here is that he has so alienated senior officials, not least by likening
them to Nazis, that he has hardly earned their loyalty.”

What was the Guardian suggesting –
that disloyal intelligence agents keep on searching
regardless? And what if they come up with what they claim is a smoking
gun?

Explained Pilkington: “To take a flight of fancy, what
if it [i.e. Steele’s findings] were substantiated? That would again come down
to a question of politics. No US president has ever been forced out of office
by impeachment (Richard Nixon resigned before the vote; Andrew Johnson and Bill
Clinton were acquitted by the Senate). Any such procedure would have to be
prepared and approved by a majority of the House of Representatives, and then
passed to the Senate for a two-thirds majority vote. As the Republicans hold
the reins in both chambers, it would take an almighty severing of ties between
Trump and his own party to even get close to such a place.”

It’s a long shot, but the Guardian’s
recommendation is that rogue agents keep on digging until they strike pay dirt,
at which point they should go straight to Congress and persuade – if not
pressure – the Republican leadership to initiate the process of throwing Trump
out of office.

This is not the same as sending an armored column to
attack Capitol Hill, but it’s close. Essentially, the Guardian was
calling on the intelligence agencies to assume ultimate responsibility
regarding who can sit in the Oval Office and who cannot.

A Desperate Establishment

All of which demonstrates how desperate the
military-intelligence complex has grown after Clapper’s report on alleged
Russian hacking of Democratic emails met with such a derisory reception
following its publication on Jan. 6. Even the Timesadmitted that it provided “no new evidence to support
assertions that Moscow meddled covertly through hacking and other actions”
while the Daily Beastsaid it was “unlikely to convince a single skeptic”
due to a notable absence of anything by way of back-up data.

The Steele dossier was supposed to take up the
slack. Yet it has fallen short as well. It asserts, for example, that
Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to discuss hacking with a
Russian official named Oleg Solodukhin, a claim that both men have since denied. It misspells the name of a major Russian bank and
gets its Russian geography wrong too.

As Owen Matthews points out in a very smart article in Newsweek, it “seems to
be under the impression that the suburb of Barvikha on the tony Rublevskoe
highway is a closed government compound, instead of just an expensive vacation
home area favored by the new rich.”

The dossier misspells the name of an Azeri real-estate
mogul named Aras Agalarov and “reports his association with Trump as news in
August 2016 – when Agalarov publicly organized Trump’s visit to the Miss
Universe pageant in 2013 and arranged a meeting with top Russian businessmen
for Trump afterward, both of which were widely reported at the time.”

Other aspects of the dossier don’t add up
either. It reports that the Russian government “has been cultivating,
supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years” in order to “encourage
splits and divisions in the Western alliance.” But as Matthews points out,
Trump wasn’t in politics five years ago and was considered a long shot for
months after entering the presidential race in mid-2015. So how could the
Kremlin be sure that their man would ultimately prevail?

The dossier says that Trump “accepted a regular flow
of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on Democratic and other political
rivals.” But Trump gave no hint of having inside information when he
called for “Crooked Hillary” to be locked up for purging her email files; to
the contrary, he did so on the basis of information available on every front
page. The memo says that the Russians also had “compromising material” on
Clinton. If so, then why wasn’t it used?

Hearsay Evidence

The discrepancies go on. But this is what one
would expect of a document based entirely of hearsay in which Source
A claims to have gotten a juicy tidbit from Source B, who heard it from Source
C deep inside the Kremlin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin during a state visit
to Austria on June 24, 2014. (Official Russian government photo)

Grasping at straws, the Guardian’s Ed
Pilkington conceded that no news agency has been able to verify the dossier’s
findings. But, he said, they are “unlikely to be discarded as quickly or
as conclusively as Trump would like” for the simple reason that “the flip side
of information that cannot be classed reliable is that neither can it be
classed unreliable.”

But the same could be said for information that
someone got from a friend whose brother-in-law heard from a park ranger that
Barack and Michelle like to while away their evenings snorting cocaine. It
can’t be classed as reliable because no one can verify that it’s true. But
it can’t be classed as unreliable because no one can prove that it’s
wrong. So maybe the best thing to do is to impeach Obama in the few days
he has remaining just to be sure.

This not to say that the so-called President-elect’s
legitimacy is not open to question. To the contrary, it is questionable
in the extreme given that he lost the popular election by more than 2.86 million votes. In a democratic country, this should count for
something. But the intelligence community is not attacking him on democratic
grounds, needless to say, but on imperial.

Trump is a rightwing blowhard whose absurd babblings about Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen reveal a man
who is dangerously ignorant about how the world works.But he has managed to
seize on one or two semi-good ideas over the years. One is that Obama
administration’s confrontational policies toward Russia are a recipe for disaster,
while another is that toppling Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with Al Qaeda and ISIS
still up and about will only hasten their march on Damascus.

Both views are perfectly sensible. But because
Washington’s endlessly bellicose foreign-policy establishment is wedded to the
opposite, it sees them as high treason.

This is very serious. U.S. foreign policy has
been marked by a high degree of continuity since World War II as Republican and
Democratic presidents alike pledged to uphold the imperial agenda. But
Trump, as radical in his way as William Jennings Bryan was in 1896 or Henry A.
Wallace in 1948, is bucking the consensus to an unprecedented degree.

Even though its policies have led to disaster after
disaster, the foreign-policy establishment is aghast. Consequently, it is
frantically searching for a way to prevent him from carrying his ideas
out. The intelligence agencies appear to be running out of time with the
inauguration only a few days away. But that doesn’t mean they’re giving
up. All it means, rather, is that they’ll go deeper
underground. Trump may enter the White House on Jan. 20. But the big
question is how long he’ll remain.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books
including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy (Harcourt Brace).